Three Days of the Condor

Three Days of the Condor. 1975 Paramount Pictures.
Starring: Robert Redford, Faye Dunaway, Cliff Robertson, Max von Sydow, John Houseman
Director: Sydney Pollack
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Joe Turner (Redford) is a New York City-based CIA employee who can't deal with Agency discipline, and he wonders why he can't tell people what he does for a living. He works in a Open Source Intelligence position, reading books, newspapers and magazines from around the world, looking for new ideas and hidden meanings. When the movie begins, Turner has filed a report to the CIA headquarters about a bad horror novel his office has been reading, one with strange plot elements, and one translated into a unusual assortment of languages (Arabic, Spanish, and Dutch; not French or Russian).

One day, Turner goes out for lunch, and a group of armed men led by an Alsatian named Joubert (von Sydow) invades the office, killing six employees. When Turner comes back to find the massacre, he realizes he's in deep trouble, and dials an emergency number. He also finds out that another coworker who had stayed home sick from work is also dead. After giving his code name "Condor", Turner is put into contact with Higgins (Robertson), the Deputy Director of the CIA's New York agency. A concerned (and not involved in the conspiracy at the moment) Higgins directs Turner to keep quiet. Turner quickly learns that he cannot trust anyone within the CIA after a botched assassination attempt, and sets out to figure out what's going on by himself, and why he's being targeted for death by his own employers.

Recommended. It's a gripping and intelligent film.